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Posted: July 2, 2009

New workshop on biomedical nanoinformatics

(Nanowerk News) On the 1st of September 2009, in Sarajevo (Bosnia), the Workshop "Nanoinformatics: New Challenges for Biomedical Informatics at the nano level" wil be held. This event is included in the Medical Informatics Europe 2009 (MIE2009) conference. It will be organized by the ACTION-Grid Project, coordinated by the Biomedical Informatics Group of UPM.

This workshop will address issues related with a novel discipline known as (Biomedical) Nanoinformatics. The latter can be defined as the application of informatics and computational methods and resources to the field of nanotechnology and, particularly, nanomedicine. Medical or BioNanoinformatics can be also viewed as a continuum of Biomedical Informatics down to the nano level, approaching in this way a huge set of new possibilities in fields like drug design and delivery, personalized medicine, nanosurgery, disease monitoring and prevention, and many others.

In the workshop, international experts will present new advances on Medical Nanoinformatics and the challenges bound with this emerging discipline. In this context the workshop will also address the relation between Translational Bioinformatics and the application of the same principles to the new discipline defining the concept of Translational (Biomedical) Nanoinformatics. Members of the project, which include the Institute of Health Carlos III (co-scientific leader, Fernando Martin-Sanchez, Spain), FORTH (Greece), Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, University of Talca (Chile), University of Zagreb Medical School and HealthGrid, are involved in designing the foundations of this new discipline and the creation of a scientific White Paper and a roadmap for future Framework Programmes at the European Commission.

Members of the University of Utah are also involved in the organization of this workshop.

Nanoinformatics implies a huge potential for providing the informatics tools needed to fully exploit the possibilities of nanomedicine, including diagnostic, therapeutic, prognostic and preventive procedures. This workshop aims to summarize the current open research lines in this area and provide a general scenario in order to understand the deep impact that this discipline can achieve in biomedical research and practice.